Finding the Right Fit 

Ashley Gragtmans of Parsec Financial

By Kevin Adler

“I’ve been lucky to find the right fit for my career early on in life,” says Ashley Gragtmans, CFP^®, senior financial advisor at Parsec Financial, a firm with six offices across North Carolina. “They take care of us as employees, just like we take care of our clients.”

Clearly, this is so, as Gragtmans has spent all of her financial planning career at the firm. “Out of college, I interned briefly at Parsec before getting a job in the accounting department at a large company. I quickly determined the accounting job wasn’t a good fit. I thought the work I witnessed and did at Parsec was so much more meaningful,” she says.

That was nearly 13 years ago, and Gragtmans explored numerous roles as the firm expanded to more than 75 staff members, 2,060 clients, and $3.7 billion in assets under management as of Dec. 31, 2022.

“My time in client service helped me understand how rewarding it is to help clients solve problems. I wanted to expand that into financial advice and decided to pursue the CFP^® designation,” Gragtmans says. “I talked to a number of managers here and said that I want to be an advisor one day, and I worked my way up. I’ve done pretty much every job—client service, portfolio management, and marketing. I was a financial planner, a junior advisor, and now a senior advisor.”

The culture of promoting from within has grown the firm since Bart Boyer opened Parsec in 1980. (Boyer is considered one of the founders of NAPFA and is a past chair.) For Gragtmans, senior members of the firm acted as mentors and encouraged her to become active in organizations such as NAPFA. The firm paid for her credentialling, starting with the CFP^®, and followed by Behavioral Financial Advisor^™ and Chartered SRI Counselor^®.

Much as the firm has invested in its individuals, it has also invested in its community. The Parsec Prize, a grants program funded with about 1% of annual revenues, dates to 2005. In 2022, the Parsec Prize awarded $210,000 to 14 organizations.

More recently, Parsec launched a four-year commitment to improving diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the profession. In conjunction with the CFP Board, it created the $100,000 Parsec Financial CFP^® Certification Diversity Scholarship in 2021, which “aims to advance diversity in the financial planning profession by providing financial assistance to qualified individuals in the Southeast United States who are from underrepresented populations in the profession and who strive to obtain the CFP^® certification.” Individuals can receive up to $5,000.

In addition, the company’s DEI Committee meets regularly and has hired diversity experts to help it identify other ways to improve outreach and inclusiveness. “It’s not only about hiring, but about trying to make this an inclusive place to work and for clients to come,” Gragtmans says.

Expanded Services

The DEI initiatives are only the most recent example of Parsec’s strategy over the years to expand its services and reach more people. It added tax services in 2018 through an acquisition, socially responsible investing (SRI) in 2020, and a partnership with First Covenant Trust to offer administrative trustee services in 2022.

Expanded services lead to a larger client base, and a larger client base requires new services. It’s a virtuous circle that the firm hopes to accelerate.

“Two years ago, we launched niche marketing campaigns targeting 12 specific client segments,” Gragtmans says. “We have had success specifically marketing to these groups (such as female investors, SRI, retirees) to meet them where they are and provide personalized thought leadership on topics of interest to them.”

While saying that a firm with more than 2,060 client families can’t categorize them easily, Gragtmans identifies retirees, small business owners, and physicians as major components of the mix. “Personally, my book of business contains a lot of female investors, young married couples, and those interested in socially responsible investing. I suspect this is largely because I am a young female interested in SRI, so I attract like-minded individuals,” she says.

She notes that a Morgan Stanley study in 2019 found that 85% of individual investors showed some interest in SRI, and that figure increased to 95% for millennials. “Additionally, 91% of millennials reported that not only do they wish to invest sustainably, but they also want accountability and transparency into those claims,” she says.

For every client, the relationship starts with conversations about goals, but it’s possibly most eye-opening for younger clients. “My challenge is getting them to see the value of hiring a financial advisor and showing them that it could be life changing if they hire a professional early in their careers,” she says. “They have a lot more opportunities for planning than a retiree.”

Depending on their circumstances, younger adults might be first-time home buyers or need to save for their children’s education. Some of them talk about retiring early or starting a business. As goals change, so does their long-term financial plan. “We’ve had people who said they want to retire at 50, and then they have two kids, and they’re on a new path,” Gragtmans says.

For a few of her older clients, Gragtmans noticed that the Covid-19 pandemic led them down a new path. “With all the restrictions and changes in their job, some clients just said, ‘I’m done,’” she says. “They did not want to navigate the workforce during the pandemic. But I didn’t have a lot of people changing careers just because they could work online and from anywhere.”

Tools and Strategy

Regardless of a client’s situation, Gragtmans and Parsec’s advising teams use a range of tools familiar to many NAPFA firms. Atop the list are eMoney and Holistiplan. “From tax planning to financial planning, they’re useful for bringing things together,” Gragtmans says.

When meeting with an existing client, Gragtmans says she’ll have an updated case scenario, which eMoney enables her to adjust on the fly. “For example, the client might want to retire at 60, and we can show them what it would look like financially over their lifetime,” she says. “If things look great, then the client might say let’s bump up that retirement date.”

Investing recommendations are driven by a core philosophy of creating broadly diversified portfolios. For the equities portion, this includes allocations to large-, mid-, and small-cap companies as well as developed- and emerging-market international investments. The fixed-income allocation is diversified among different types of bonds, a mix of open-ended funds, and ETFs.

“We tend to be very goals-oriented here—everything is tied back to the financial plan,” Gragtmans says. “Investment management is always tied back to clients’ short-term goals, long-term goals, and, especially, their values. It’s a rewarding relationship when I can get clients to buy into that philosophy and when they’re willing to tie back to their goals.

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Busy at Home and at Work Working full-time and raising a family is a complicated daily navigation for many parents, and Ashley Gragtmans is no exception. She and her husband, Chris, have three children: Alice (age five), Polly (three), and Claire (nine months). Maternity and parental leave at Parsec Financial is three months, which Gragtmans used to the full extent with each birth. But she says the support within the firm goes far beyond that policy. “When I’m out, there are other advisors who step in, and they know my clients. If they have to get up to speed on a client issue, they put in the work. And I’ve done the same for them,” she says. With both Gragtmans working full time, she says the biggest challenge is when the kids get sick. “Thankfully, we work as a team to juggle our daily professional and personal priorities,” Gragtmans says. “But it’s been tough because our childcare hours and daycare haven’t gone back to pre-Covid hours. So it’s a challenge to manage it all.” Her firm made time management a bit easier in the wake of Covid by saying that Fridays are a work-at-home day for all staff. Gragtmans takes a second day at home, working with clients and colleagues on Zoom. “Parsec is really generous; we are a family-first firm. Management has kids—they get it,” she says. “It’s one of the reasons why I never thought about going anywhere else.”

 

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Parsec Financial, at a Glance

Location: Asheville, NC, is the main office. The firm has five other offices in North Carolina.

Website: ParsecFinancial.com

Year founded: 1980 

Number of staff: 75 

Number of clients: 2,069 (as of Dec. 31, 2022) 

Amount of money managed: $3.745 billion (as of Dec. 31, 2022) 

Description of typical clients: Large percentages of retirees, small business owners, and physicians. But the firm reaches many other constituent groups, from young adults to socially responsible investors (both are special practice areas for Ashley Gragtmans).

Typical client needs: Long-term planning, investments (and growing interest in socially responsible investing) 

Favorite financial planning websites: Parsec Financial sponsors a site called Young Money, Smart Money. “It’s full of financial basics. I refer people to that site all the time,” Gragtmans says. “I am also a big fan of Michael Kitces.”

Favorite nonfinancial planning app: Strava (running, cycling, hiking app)

Piece of advice to fellow NAPFA members: “I believe the thing that has helped me the most is finding my niche and group of people I connect with. I think that it’s important that your niche be tied to your own personal values. Once I determined what that was, I became a lot more successful. It’s important to believe in what you are doing.”